Inside Out
by Siren Darkhill
Summary: What would it mean if Dina were human? How does it change Alice's roll if a human Dina follows her into wonderland...and turns inside out? I don't know-this won't answer the question. But it will ask it. One-shot.


**Here we go with my first Alice in Wonderland fic. Not really sure why I wrote it, not really sure what's happening in it or if there's a point. If you have any ideas, feel free to puzzle it out and let me know. Have fun with it, and if you want me to add any little details or even elongate, suggestions are always appreciated, read and considered.**

Dina couldn't really figure out what had happened. One minute, she had been walking happily behind Alice, plowing through tall grasses on their way to town because it was Friday and they wanted to spend their weekly allowance on sweets. The next thing she knew, Alice was nowhere to be seen, and Dina was alone at the edge of the tall grasses, with no sign of Alice's blue dress or white-blond hair.

Dina stood between the grass and the tree line. She wasn't exactly scared—she knew this property well enough, as she and Alice had played here constantly ever since they were little. But as she turned to stare into the trees behind her, she couldn't help but feel a prick of worry. Their mother had always told them to be careful about the woods—that they reached beyond the property, so any number of things could be in there. As a rule, the two only went in when Alice was in a particularly exploratory mood. To make matters worse, Dina couldn't help but wonder how on earth Alice would manage to find her. It wasn't as though she could yell out…

Dina gulped. She had been mute as long as she'd known Alice. Their mother said that when she'd been found on their doorstep, she hadn't been able to say a word—not even her own name, even had she remembered it. Alice had always been very good about keeping tabs on her adopted sister—she'd always been the brave, responsible one, and seemed to have assigned herself as Dina's protector. Dina supposed it came from being older. Because of Alice's adventuresome habits, there had been numerous occasions when Alice's "bodyguard" status had been called upon. But despite the many fixes they'd gotten into and the adventures they'd gone on, nothing like this had ever happened. It made Dina very nervous.

_I suppose I'll just wait here. Mother always said if you're lost, don't move around so people can find you…_ Dina thought worriedly. She fully intended to simply wait until Alice came and found her, because she could never find her way through the grasses, and Alice could because she was taller. So she sighed once, then walked over to where a large tree stood fairly close to the edge of the grasses, and plopped down to lean against its roots. She pulled her knees up to her chest and placed her chin on them, a lock of red hair falling into her vivid green eyes.

The sun was warm and bright. It was one of those golden days at the end of summer, when the cicadas were obnoxiously loud and the grass field seemed to glow. A patch of sunlight filtered through the leaves of the tree Dina rested against, warming her back, and Dina felt herself grow drowsy. _I should stay awake to wait for Alice…_but she couldn't resist the urge to sleep, and soon her eyes fluttered closed.

Dina could never say how long she'd been asleep. When she woke, the day was still as warm and bright as she had left it, but the patch of sun had moved from her back to right in front of her feet. Still there was no Alice. Dina sighed, leaning back against the trunk of the tree. _Should I try to find my way home?_She wondered. She couldn't possibly be any more lost than she was now. But then again, if Alice were to end up here and she was gone…

Dina still couldn't make up her mind when she felt a sharp tug. She sat bolt upright, eyes wide and heart hammering. _What was that?!_ She stared accusingly at her arm, trying to distinguish a mark on it. That tug…it had felt too real. As though someone had actually closed their fingers about her upper arm and yanked. There had even been a sort of stinging sensation. But Dina couldn't see a mark of any kind, and when she glanced around, she couldn't see anything or anyone to have performed such an action. Unnerved, Dina decided she'd had enough of waiting and to try and find her way back. But just as she was pushing herself to her feet, she felt a second, sharper tug that she feared might yank her off her feet. She couldn't stop a wimper from passing through her lips. Alice had always compared her to a small creature, like a kitten or a mouse, because the only noises she could make were small and quiet. Dina never minded—she disliked loud things, anyway—but now, she would have traded a lot to have a voice. A real one, so that she could scream for Alice to find her. But that was impossible, so she steeled herself and began to walk away…only to find that she couldn't go anywhere. It was that physical force, again—as though someone had latched onto both her ankles with hands of iron. Dina felt her heart lurch. What was going on?

_Come find me…_Dina froze at a voice in her head. Who was it? Why did it sound so familiar? As though she was moving through molasses, Dina turned to look over her shoulder into the forest. It seemed less forbidding, for some reason. She had a sudden, pressing desire to go find something within the trees. She turned, staring into the forest, almost expecting someone to jump out a pull her in. She glanced back toward the field. No sign of Alice.

_It wouldn't hurt to take a quick peek…right? If Alice calls for me, I'll still hear her._ So Dina, in a mood of adventure that was quite unlike her usual self, walked into the trees to be swallowed up in their shadow.

The forest was darker than it had appeared from the outside. In fact, the few times Dina and Alice had ventured into the trees, Dina couldn't remember it ever having been this shadowy. As her feet continued to lead her forward, quite independently from her will, Dina kept thinking she saw fantastical creatures in the shadows. Her heart was hammering in her ears, and she felt the dull throb of fear in her veins. However, she felt a bizarre sensation along with the fear that she couldn't quite place. Was it apprehension? No…more like anticipation. Maybe even a nostalgic sort of excitement. More and more, Dina felt that wherever this tug was leading her, she would discover something amazing.

She had walked a good fifteen minutes when she found herself standing before a giant oak tree, with massive roots splayed in every direction across the mossy ground. She wondered what had brought her here…then she looked down. At her feet yawned a gaping hole, a good arm's length across, filled with pitch blackness. Dina peered into it, wondering how far down it went. She found herself absorbed in staring into the darkness, so that she didn't immediately notice when a low rumble began to be emitted. Then it grew louder, into a full growl, and a blast of cold air whipped Dina's hair back from her face. Alarmed, Dina leaped back from the whole, staring at it as though it might attack her. In light of the bizarre nature of the past half hour, she wouldn't have been surprised if it did.

"Dina!" the petite girl nearly jumped out of her skin when her name drifted toward her through the trees. "Dina, where'd you go?!" She spun around. That was Alice! With a glance over her shoulder at the hole, she began sprinting back through the forest. When she emerged from the trees, there stood Alice, hands on her hips and a flush on her cheeks. Dina smiled.

Alice was tall and slim, with shoulder-length, white-blond hair and clear blue eyes. Dressed in a white and blue summer dress, with the sun a glowing backdrop, Dina thought she looked like an angel. Then again, Dina always thought that Alice was perfect: beautiful, brave, intelligent and kind, with a propensity for adventures and boundless curiosity. Not like Dina's darker coloring, slight frame and shy nature. She looked up to Alice—two years her senior—as one might recognize an idol.

Alice's gaze lit upon Dina the second the younger girl burst from the shadow of the trees.

"Where on earth did you go?!" she yelled, marching over to Dina and shaking her by the shoulders. "I was worried sick! You know you can't just wander off like that!" Dina just took it all with a smile. If she could, she would explain that she hadn't meant to—that she couldn't even explain how it had happened. But as usual, her voice hung stiff and heavy in her throat, and no words would come out. Alice sighed, glancing toward the sun where it dropped low in the sky. She turned back to Dina with a half-smile.

"If we hurry, we can make the sweet shop before it closes," she offered. Dina's grin lit her face, and she grabbed Alice's hand to yank her back into the field of tall grasses, and on toward the town.

"Dina, stop skipping around like that—you'll drop the bag!" Alice scolded. Dina grinned mischievously over her shoulder, continuing to prance through the grasses, bleached silver in the moonlight. Their parents would doubtless be furious when the two returned—they weren't supposed to stay out past sunset—but somehow Dina couldn't care. As she danced beneath the moonlight, she felt alive, invigorated by some mysterious energy. She spread her arms and spun in circles under the moon's watchful eye and her sister's exasperated smile, clutching a bag of candy and chocolates in her right hand.

Suddenly, Alice stopped, looking ahead at the not insignificant distance they still had to cover before they would even clear the field, let alone the remaining half mile to their house. The tall blonde narrowed her eyes at the distance, then turned to Dina with a serious expression.

"Why don't we take the shortcut, today?" she suggested coolly. Dina froze, eyes wide. The woods that stretched a long way between the town and her house were completely off-limits. That's why she and Alice had to take the long way around, through the field, whenever they went back and forth. She started shaking her head—if the woods were dangerous in the day, how much worse would it be to cut through them in the dark? But something stopped her. The intense rush of energy that had come upon her under the moon's glare urged her toward the woods, and Dina couldn't explain why. So she shrugged to Alice, indicating that she was fine with using the shortcut. Alice smiled, led the way toward the edge of the trees. As the two drew nearer, Dina's heartbeat sped up until it was pounding in her ears. She felt conflicting senses rolling about in her stomach. On the one hand, she was unexplainably drawn to the trees tonight. On the other, however, the closer they walked to those long-limbed shadows, the more she got a sense of foreboding. Dina got this feeling every once in a while before something bad happened—like a sixth sense. The last time she had felt it, Alice had fallen off her horse in the field and tumbled, unconscious, into a ditch.

Strong, warm fingers curled around Dina's slender, cool ones, and the girl looked up to see Alice smiling reassuringly at her. It was only then that she realized she had stopped walking and was staring nervously into the forest. She weakly returned Alice's smile, and the two continued on their way, swallowed up by the hungry shadows that reached their fingers out from the trees.

Dina felt a thrill of ice skate up her back, causing the hairs on the nape of her neck to stand on end. She squeezed Alice's hand tighter, staring nervously at the oddly shaped shadows that seemed to reach out at her. _I don't like this,_ she thought. _It feels too familiar._

"Hey, what's this?" Alice's voice, loud after the heavy silence that had surrounded the pair, jolted Dina out of her ominous daze, and she realized, again, that they had stopped moving. Confused, she looked up at Alice to find her staring, brow puckered, at the ground in front of them. Dina turned to follow her gaze—and felt her stomach lurch. They had come to that hole in the ground. Dina stared at it, feeling her fingers go cold.

Clenching her jaw, Dina tried to tug Alice away from the hole and around the tree. _Come on, Let's go home,_She wanted to urge. _We're already late…_but Alice stood frozen as if she were in a trance.

Suddenly, the tall blonde snapped her head so that she was smiling at Dina. "Let's check it out!" She announced. Dina shook her head emphatically—when Alice said "check it out," Dina knew she meant "Let's go down there," which was the last thing Dina wanted. This hole gave her the shivers. But Alice had already prized her hand away from Dina's vice-like grip and was dangling her feet over the edge of the hole. Because of the blackness, it looked suddenly like she didn't have feet anymore, at all.

"Wow, this looks really deep," Alice muttered appreciatively. "I wonder how far down it goes?" _Maybe it never stops,_ Dina couldn't help but think. She tapped Alice on the shoulder, giving her sister the face she made whenever she thought something was a bad idea. "Don't be such a coward, Dina." Alice said impatiently. "We'll just explore for a minute, then be on our way. I know, I know…we're already late. But since that's the case, it shouldn't make much of a difference if we're just a few more minutes late, should it?" Dina tried to nod her head, but once again, Alice was off before Dina could do anything.

Dina stared into the thick darkness where Alice had disappeared, frozen. She waited to hear something—anything. A scream, a thud, a shout to announce that Alice was alright. Nothing came. So after a minute of fidgeting about the edge of the hole, staring down uncertainly and trying to gather her courage, Dina leapt in after Alice.

Dina would have screamed if she could. She wondered if Alice had screamed, and if perhaps Dina just hadn't been able to hear it from the other side of the hole. But then, Alice probably wouldn't scream about something like this—she would rejoice in the magic of it, and think it was all one grand adventure.

As Dina fell, it was as though broken fragments of the world fell around her. A rocking chair, a ticking clock, pieces of walls and strange blocks of color tumbled around her. Well, some of them tumbled. Many of them simply floated in place, as though they were quite comfortably sitting on a floor that Dina was not aware of. At one point, Dina even fell on a couch sitting on a tiny island of floor that floated in little circles around a small round coffee table with a broken teapot and a book on it. The couch promptly turned upside-down, however, effectively dumping Dina out to fall straight through the floor. She got the distinct feeling that both the furniture and the tiling had done it on purpose.

After what felt like hours, Dina spotted a floor—one that she hoped was solid and would, in fact, choose to act as a floor should and halt her fall. Then she realized that she was falling much faster than she had thought, and began to worry about impact. Just a few feet from the black and white checked tiles, however, Dina found her momentum slowed miraculously, and she drifted quite peacefully to her feet.

Brushing off her wrinkled skirt, Dina looked around at the odd room in which she found herself. The room was large—huge, actually—with a ceiling and walls so high and wide, Dina couldn't actually see them, at all. She wondered if maybe there weren't any.

On the far end of the room sat a little door, simply standing on its own against a white backdrop of space. Towering over it was a glass table—worth at least Dina's height a few times over. Lying near its feet, she spotted the glimmer of an empty bottle, turned on its side. She walked over to it, and noticed that attached to it was a small slip of paper that read "drink me." There was no longer any liquid in it, and Dina could only conclude that Alice had drunken it. _But then where did she go?_Dina asked herself, for Alice was certainly nowhere in the immediate vicinity.

After a moment wasted on glancing fruitlessly around the space, Dina decided that Alice must have gone through the door—though she did wonder how Alice had managed to squeeze herself through such a tiny door. _I wonder if that bottle had anything to do with it…_somehow, Dina sensed that Alice had drunken something she shouldn't have, and that if she hadn't, she would still be in this space. Nevertheless, the small girl walked toward the door, thinking that she would figure out a way through once she got there. However, as she approached, the door seemed to grow—or perhaps it was that she, herself, was shrinking. Whichever the case, by the time Dina reached the little wooden door, it was quite normal sized, and she envisioned no trouble getting through it, at all.

So imagine her surprise when, upon grasping the brass knob at the center of the door, and loud "ow!" was heard from under her hand. Startled, Dina snatched her hand back and leapt a short distance backward. To her astonishment, the doorknob was moving around in a most peculiar fashion—rather like someone scrunching up their nose. Sure enough, after a moment of gawking, Dina began to notice small, beady eyes that she had taken for knots in the wood above the knob, and the small key-hole beneath was beginning to look more and more like an oddly down-turned mouth. The next thing she knew, the beady little eyes were glaring at her.

"How would you like it if someone grabbed your nose like that?" the door asked, affronted. Dina shook her head, unsure how to respond. The door seemed to take it for enough of an answer. "Quite right! I suspect you wouldn't like it at all. Now, since you have practically ripped my face out of the wall, care to tell me why you're here?" Dina simply stared, fidgeting in place, unsure how to explain herself. After observing her flustered movements for a moment, the door sighed. "Alright, alright. I understand. But even so, I've already let one creature like yourself through, today, and I'm afraid that one is quite bad enough for my reputation. You'll have to go back."

Dina froze. Go back? She couldn't. She was positive this other "creature" that the door mentioned was Alice, and she absolutely had to get through and find her sister. Suddenly, a rush of energy overtook her, and she felt as though she grew a couple inches.

_I won't go back!_Her mind shouted forcefully. She put her hands on her hips, as she had seen her mother do countless times when lecturing her and Alice, and glared down at the door, putting all of her determination into her stance. The door squinted up at her, beady eyes flashing. _Let me through!_

What happened next baffled Dina for quite a while afterwards, and would not be explained until long after it had been forgotten. Dina could only think of it as a large wave of something—energy, perhaps, or will—seemed to be yanked out of her and hurled toward the door. She blinked for a moment, feeling limp and tired and fighting hard not to fall to her knees. It was as though all of her strength had been sucked out.

If Dina was feeling weak, the poor little door was feeling positively frail. Its little eyes had gone wide, and its key-hole mouth hung open in a little square.

"You—you're…" it tried to stutter. It seemed to be in shock, staring at Dina as though she had sprouted two extra hands on her head. Dina frowned, shaking her head. The door appeared to swallow—if doors can do such things—and started again. "You aren't at all who I was expecting," it muttered thinly. Dina hadn't a clue what that could mean, but in wake of his next words, she didn't care. "You can go through—absolutely. How could I say no?" Most of what the door was mumbling seemed as though it was not actually directed at Dina, but it swung open to reveal a wide, bright stretch of sand, and Dina happily ran through without thinking any questions.

No sooner had Dina raced through the door than she felt a terrible rending sensation somewhere in her middle, and her vision became unaccountably blurred. She squinted, blinked furiously and wrapped her arms about her middle in an attempt to hold herself together. It didn't seem to work, for she could feel herself warp, contract beneath her fingers. She was too terrified to look down, so her gaze remained anchored on the white sand and impossibly blue sky as an intense burning sensation covered her skin. She writhed instinctively, fell at last to her knees and dug her hands into the sand as her spine arched upwards. he burning had spread to her face, and it felt as though each of her bones-the tips of her fingers and toes, her spine, even her skull-were _moving_; trying to escape their binds of flesh and gallivant over the sand without her.

At last, after enduring the entire process in enforced silence, an agonized howl broke from Dina's lips, and her mind lapsed into darkness along with her vision.

It rose from the sand with a bounce in its step and a fluff of its thick, unnaturally pink-and-purple fur. It's whiskers curled in a refined sort of way from its round head, and it began to trot across the beach, kicking sand scornfully behind it.

"To be mute for so long...unthinkable," it muttered to itself. "What a horribly right-side-up sort of world." It let out a feline sigh, waved its tail and a wide, cheshire grin spread across its rather flat countenance. "It's awfully good to be upside down again." And then, with a poof, it was gone. Even its uncanny smile hovered above the sand for only a moment before fading into the blue, and the beach was blissfully empty once again.

On the other side, the door rolled its eyes with a sheepish sigh.

"Never should have let him out in the first place," it muttered to itself. "If I'd known she'd return like that...well. But I suppose it was a nice bit of peace to have him gone." A small smile stretched its little brass face. "I suppose now that she's back, the trouble will start all over again. I wonder if this Alice will make it back without him..." But even as the little door mumbled thoughtfully to itself, it doubted that the cycle would ever be broken. For that creature had played its strange game for millenia, and never once had Alice won.

**Not sure what just happened...though I think she turned into the Cheshire Cat. Inside Out, indeed. Well, that's that, I suppose-though I feel bad for poor Alice. The door made it sound rather like she's going to have a tough time of it. Oh well. Let me know what you think, if you feel like it.**

**Darkhill**


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